‘Oh,’ said Oz.
‘I’m sorry. I just got really angry.’
He nodded. ‘Did you say anything about me? Or about what I told you?’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘And he wasn’t doing anything suspicious at this private view?’
I shook my head. I felt terrible and Oz was right; talking about Tobias did spoil something.
‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Are you still following him?’
Oz nodded.
‘Also nothing?’
‘Also nothing.’
I wanted to be able to give him something. I thought about Mum’s patient in the courtyard, with his long limbs and blue eyes and his white hair, pressed and parted like an ironed napkin. But Tobias hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen him.
‘Ralf?’ Oz said. ‘Is there something else you’re not telling me?’
‘I think it’s nothing.’
‘What’s nothing?’
I pulled up a knee and rested my chin on it. ‘I saw this guy again. This patient of Mum’s. I saw him the day before I came to the shop. It’s only odd because Mum’s patients normally come in the front entrance, so we’d never see them. And the first time I saw him walking across the courtyard Tobias was there. But then he wasn’t there the second time and he didn’t actually go anywhere near Tobias’s flat. There’s also no way they’re working together anyway.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s in the British Army. The patient. I mean, I think he is.’
‘Why?’
‘Just the way he looked. There’s a type. Mum has a few British Army patients.’
Oz thought about this. The untapped ash at the end of his cigarette fell to the floor, exploding silently beside his bare leg. ‘Your mum’s a psychiatrist, oder?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘A psychologist. A therapist.’
‘What’s that got to do with the Army?’
‘Well, she used to work there.’
‘The Army?’
‘Yeah. My grandad was an army doctor. She used to work at the military hospital when she was a student and then when she was doing her psychotherapy training. Just admin stuff. But because of that and because of Grandad she often gets referred Army people if they’re having relationship crises. I mean, to be fair, it’s usually the wives that get in touch, I think. But she’s the kind of go-to counsellor if you’re a British expat with a relationship problem or sex problems – that’s her speciality. I mean, the British are pretty reticent about getting any kind of counselling, but she once had this capitaine who—’
‘This what?’ he said. He sat up and the ashtray clattered to the floor and rolled along on its side like a detached wheel, shedding its dust and knocking against the skirting board. It fell flat and came to a whirling stop like a spun coin.
‘Capitaine,’ I muttered. ‘It’s just French for captain. It was this French captain who—’
‘She treats French people too?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Gran’s French. Mum grew up bilingual.’
‘And she treats Germans? She speaks German?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘She … ’
Oz got onto his knees and gripped my outstretched foot. His eyes were darting about the floor in between us. ‘So she talks about her patients with you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, not who they are, but she talks about them in broad strokes. Like if something funny happens.’
‘So you couldn’t identify any of them?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But why is that … ? What’s going on?’
‘Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes’ had been playing. Oz’s hi-fi didn’t have auto-reverse and once Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s voices faded out we listened to the hiss of the magnetic tape tense and the cassette crunch to a stop, then fall silent.
‘Tobias doesn’t need to go anywhere to get his kompromat information. That’s why we haven’t caught him out by following him. He’s getting it all from your mum.’
‘No,’ I said automatically. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’
‘Wouldn’t she?’
‘No,’ I said, unsure now. ‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Have you ever heard of Romeo spies?’
I shook my head slowly.
‘They’re agents, men usually, who target women who have access to important information. They become the men of their dreams – read the same books, like the same music, dress just the right way. All of that. The women they go for are usually secretaries working for someone important, but your mum’s files would be absolute gold. It would be irresistible.’
‘You think Tobias is having an affair with my mum so she’ll pass over files about her patients?’
‘It can’t be a coincidence.’
I thought about my mum carefully recording someone’s sexual problems and then handing them over to Tobias, his upper lip still sweaty from sex. It was horrible, but also impossible. I couldn’t believe it. And then I realised: ‘She doesn’t need to pass them over.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Mum’s consulting rooms are attached to our flat. If he’s in the flat then he can get to her files. He has a key to our flat and we have a key to his – he waters our plants when we’re away.’
Oz nodded slowly, entranced by his breakthrough. ‘But surely your mum’s consulting room is locked.’
‘Yeah, but it’s a bolt,’ I said. ‘It’s locked from inside our flat. You can’t get to our flat from Mum’s consulting rooms, but you can always get into her rooms from our flat. And the keys for the filing cabinet are next to this African mask. I mean, it wouldn’t take a genius to find them.’
He was grinning. ‘Ralf,’ he said and put a hand on my bare knee.
‘This is awful,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Tobias is … I mean, I hate him. I do hate him. But stealing people’s files and blackmailing people?’
‘But if he is “Axel” then he believes that what he’s doing is going to save the world. Save people’s lives.’
I looked at him, unconvinced. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘Well,’ Oz said, considering, ‘if we could get a look at your mum’s files or find out who this Army person is, for instance, then we could find out if the information from her patients matched anything that “Axel” has delivered.’
‘So, what, we just let ourselves into Mum’s office and take a few files?’
Oz frowned and scrutinised my face, checking that he’d understood my meaning. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘absolutely. If you and I could get hold of a copy of a file or two, then potentially that’d be it. We might be done.’
But he hadn’t understood me at all. My ‘we’ was a vague ‘we’. I meant we West Germans, not me and Oz. His frown was unknitting, though, and he was touching my cheek with his thumb. ‘Is that really something you’d be up for?’
‘I mean, I suppose,’ I said, not really understanding what I was agreeing to.
He sighed a little and sank back, sitting on the balls of his feet.
‘What?’ I said.
‘No, it’s just … I was just thinking, if you could get your hands on a few files and they really did incriminate Tobias, then we’d be done with him.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But that’s good, right?’
‘Yeah. And it just means this,’ he said, indicating me, ‘would just be about this, if you know what I mean.’
He opened his mouth to rephrase what he’d said, but I touched it and said, ‘No, I understand,’ and he laughed with pleasure. Then he gripped my neck and kissed me.
*
He lay beside me, his head resting on my chest. His hair smelt good and I didn’t want him to move away, but eventually he pecked at my cheek and said, ‘I’m going to make some coffee.’
I sat where I was for a moment, thinking that I should stay until he returned, but the long discussion about life outside, about Tobias, about my mum and her files, had mad
e my nakedness feel odd for the first time, and I went to Oz’s bedroom to pull on my pants. I’d been naked for so long that I struggled to find them, uncovering first a sock, then my shorts, kicked under the bed, and then finally my pants by the window.
I heard a hiss and a gentle woof from the kitchen and found Oz at the gas hob, shaking out a blackened match. I sat at the table and he smiled at me, passing out of the room without comment and returning wearing sky-blue Y-fronts. He filled the little Turkish coffee pot from the tap, added grounds and sugar, stirred it and put it on the flame, then leant against the wall, clearly aware of the subtle change in my mood. I had started to think about my own bedroom, realising that I would be going back to it, back to my mother and to my friends who were about to leave for university. I realised it would all have to be dealt with, that it was foolish to believe that I could escape my life. I looked at Oz, beautiful against the cracked plaster of his bare kitchen walls, and imagined going into my mother’s office and stealing someone’s file, a solemn military man with sexual health problems.
The coffee pot jumped and crackled.
‘Why do you do it?’ I asked.
‘Do what?’
‘Spy on people.’
He folded his arms. ‘I mean, it’s not really spying,’ he said. ‘It’s not the main thing I do.’
‘It’s literally spying. You sit in your car and spy on people.’
He looked at me and licked his lips. ‘Really, I only do things that relate to Dad’s apartments, to the shop, to things like that. I’m not on a retainer – they just pay me when I can be useful, but I don’t plan anything.’
‘They just use you, then?’
His head twitched as if someone had blown dust in his face. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t put it like that, Ralf. The money’s good for not doing very much. And because it’s all unofficial, I get paid in cash, so I can save up.’
‘So it’s about the money?’
‘Well, yes and no. I mean, if the Stasi came knocking I wouldn’t do it for them. I do it because I believe it’s the right thing to do. But I wouldn’t just do it out of the goodness of my heart.’
For a moment he looked attacked.
‘It’s not dangerous, is it?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t it make you a target for the Stasi?’
He softened and his arms dropped to his sides. He touched the wall behind him. ‘Honestly, Ralf, Berlin is full of informants. I’m just keeping an eye on a couple of people, maybe getting hold of some information, and then I report back to this Bavarian that comes to the shop. He’ll have a hundred Ozes all over Berlin and, yeah, there’ll probably be a few of them involved in pretty serious military stuff. But no one cares about some brown-skinned newsagent’s son from Schöneberg.’
He pushed himself off the wall and ruffled my hair, then rinsed a small cup in the sink and held up a second cup to say, ‘You too?’ I shook my head. The coffee foamed and he poured off a layer of black lather, put it back on the heat, then repeated the process when it foamed up again.
‘Why do you do it like that?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just pour it all out?’ I’d watched him do it many times over those past few days, but had never asked, afraid that it would confirm in his eyes my naivety. But I’d broken the magic now and felt like it didn’t really matter what he thought.
‘That’s just how you do it,’ Oz said. ‘How Mum did it.’
He poured off a last layer and turned the gas off.
‘What are you saving up money for?’ I said.
He smiled, holding the steaming coffee pot in one hand.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Is it something weird?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Just a bookshop.’ He put the coffee pot on the draining board and sipped at the small stoneware cup, its grainy brown glaze the colour of glossy peanut butter.
‘You already work in a bookshop.’
The coffee clung to his upper lip like a pencil moustache. ‘That’s a newsagent with a couple of books. And I want my own one. I want to do it properly.’ He put the cup down and stood there in his pants, offering up his sweetest smile.
Eighteen
I arrived back home at midnight. When I shut the door behind me I saw the light under the door of my parents’ bedroom click off, but no one emerged. I crept across the cool parquet to my room, fell into bed, slept and woke to hear my family going about their morning routine without me. I waited for the inevitable knock on the door, my mother’s tearful face, but it didn’t come. Me confronting my mum had opened up a chasm too wide to cross, and I was both terrified and glad that she hadn’t tried to.
I snoozed through the morning and finally emerged into the gentle silence of the empty flat long after they had all left. I showered and pulled on the checked red shirt and lederhosen that we had to wear for work at the beer garden. The shirt had been freshly washed and pressed.
At the kitchen table, I ate a large bowl of cereal and watched Tobias’s flat across the courtyard, but it was empty. If he knew what I’d said to Mum, I supposed, he might’ve seen me first and retired to his bedroom, which was on the other side of the building. I felt like I was hiding from the world and the world was hiding from me.
A hush of wind through the leaves of the horse chestnut moved the adjoining door to my mother’s practice. It was open. The door was never left open when she was seeing patients: the aerodynamics of the flat meant that opening Mum’s consulting-room door would push open the adjoining door to our flat, revealing to her patients the hidden family behind the waiting-room wall. If a patient had cancelled and she had used the opportunity to go out, then I was two unlocked doors away from her files.
I stood, my heart thumping, and reached out to the door. It swung towards me and hit me hard on the arm.
‘Shit!’ I said, as my mother bustled through holding her keys, then screamed when she found me behind it. ‘Jesus, Ralf!’
‘Fuck!’ I said, and scampered back to my bowl of soggy cereal.
‘You all right?’ she said. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘It’s fine,’ I said, nursing my arm.
‘What were you doing behind the door?’
‘I wasn’t behind the door,’ I barked. ‘I was going past the door and you opened it into my arm.’
She looked at the door and then back at me. I glared at the spots of milk on the plastic tablecloth.
‘I thought you’d already gone to work,’ she said, appealing to me.
‘At one.’
‘Oh.’ She looked at her watch and then at my cereals on the table. ‘Then …’ she said, unsure of herself, ‘then, I might pop out for lunch.’
I think she was hoping I would say ‘You don’t have to’, but the prospect of sitting with her as we silently ate was unbearable. She moved towards me, as if she was going to touch me, but then stopped herself. ‘You’re obviously welcome to come, but … ’
‘No,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said.
She waited. I stirred the milk in my bowl.
‘Ralf, is there anything you want to ask me?’
I looked up at her in surprise. ‘Er, I think I asked you already.’
She nodded.
‘Are you going to leave us?’ I said, and felt ashamed of myself, because my voice faltered at ‘us’. I swallowed to stop myself from crying, but Mum didn’t swallow. Her chin reddened and puckered like an old peach and tears began to run down her face.
‘I’d never leave you,’ she choked out. ‘I’d never do anything …’
‘What, to hurt us? And if Dad finds out and leaves us anyway? Is that better?’
She covered her face with her hand. ‘Oh God, Ralf,’ came her muffled voice. ‘I’ve never felt so wretched.’
‘And what am I meant to do about that?’ I said. ‘It’s not my fault.’
‘No,’ she said quietly, rubbing her bare arm across her eyes. ‘No.’ She sniffed hard and picked up her keys. ‘I’m sorry, Ralf,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for you. And I’ll make it ri
ght.’
‘I think it’s too late for that.’
She nodded, composing herself. ‘I can see how you would feel that.’
She looked at the phone and I was suddenly afraid that ‘making it right’ meant telling my dad and leaving. So I said, ‘I think you should keep away from Tobias, by the way. I think he’s a pretty dangerous person.’
She turned to me frowning, her face still red. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you should keep away from him.’
‘I understand,’ she said, though of course she didn’t. She picked up her keys. ‘I’ll make it right,’ she said again, and fled out through the front door.
I stared into my cereal bowl – the few sodden Choco Krispies that remained turned the same lilacky brown as the pool of milk – and thought that this would be our relationship now until I moved out. It seemed impossible to think it would ever be any different. Would Oz let me stay with him? I wondered. The idea of inviting myself to live with him seemed ridiculous, but perhaps if I was there often enough I could engineer it. I imagined him stopping as he brushed his teeth and saying, ‘Hey, Ralf. Why don’t you just bring your stuff over? You’re here all the time anyway.’ And I would feign deliberation before shrugging an OK.
I heard the front door to our building boom as Mum left. I stood and peered into her waiting room and, beyond, through the open door of her consulting room. I had assumed I would have to take the files at night when everyone was asleep, but I saw now that that was stupid, and much more suspicious than just wandering through in my lederhosen and taking them when I had the chance.
I rinsed out my cereal bowl in the sink and went and stood at the door, afraid of touching the door jamb in case I left fingerprints, and then realising that the whole house was covered in my fingerprints and it didn’t matter. I took a deep breath and walked straight through the waiting room and into her consulting room. On the right was a mahogany desk, on the left my mother’s green leather armchair facing a small twoseater sofa for the patient or patients, covered with a hardy mustard velour. I thought about all the people who must have sat there weeping.
I heard the distant thud of a car door being slammed and realised that Mum might be picking up something to eat from the baker’s and coming straight back to the practice, so I grabbed the key from beside the African mask on her bookshelf, unlocked the filing cabinet and pulled it open. It emitted a gasp of ancient paper. I looked through the patients’ names on the plastic tabs attached to each mud-green hanging file – Becker, Butler, Lambert, Leicester, McLaughlin, Mayerbach, Michel. Most of Mum’s patients were women or couples, so it was easy to pick out the important-sounding men. I looked for official-sounding titles and ranks in the descriptions. The files were dated from the start of their treatment to the end, and I took the summary notes from three completed therapies with men, reasoning that she wouldn’t look at these any time soon. The only current file I took something from was a Major-General Hillary Purser, who I guessed was the man I had seen in the courtyard, since he was in the British Army and the dates of his treatment matched. From his file, I took Mum’s notes from his first session, assuming that Oz could copy them and I could get them back into the file before Mum noticed.
An Honest Man Page 13